


Unlucky Number Four

by LadyHallen



Series: DOS Forum Snippets [1]
Category: Dreaming of Sunshine - Silver Queen, 残響のテロル | Zankyou no Terror | Terror in Resonance
Genre: Angst, Can you tell that this anime made me sad?, Child Death, Child Mortality, Don't copy to another site, Don't repost, Feels, Gen, Human Experimentation, Reincarnation, because it made me sad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-06
Updated: 2021-01-06
Packaged: 2021-03-16 19:48:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,462
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28587477
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyHallen/pseuds/LadyHallen
Summary: When the fire starts, something in Shikako stirs.In another life, she had been Shikabane-hime. Fires, explosions and corpses had been her legacy, the legend that surrounded that epithet.Even the serum cannot suppress the deepest instincts of a ninja and fire is wired in her blood.
Relationships: Nine & Twelve & Shikako Nara, Nine & Twelve (Zankyou no Terror)
Series: DOS Forum Snippets [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2102949
Comments: 7
Kudos: 165





	Unlucky Number Four

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this for the DOS Forums in the Crossover portion. I saved the snippet, added some more words to make it not a snippet and here we are!

She is one of the unfortunate twenty-six orphans chosen for the project. The fact that she is born with her eyes wide open made it even worse.

The Settlement, as it is called, is drab. They didn’t even make any efforts to mask the fact that it is a laboratory. A science experiment.

Shikako – no Four, that is her name now – wants to call them stupid.

They had gathered twenty-six of the _brightest orphans_ in the country to test the serum to artificially create the Savant Syndrome. They were already smart children to begin with, the addition of the serum just enhanced things. They didn’t even think that anyone would think on escaping, or turning them all in. They were confident that they had cowed the children into accepting their fate.

“Can I join?” she asks, voice soft. Because her ears had developed a hearing so sensitive that it causes her pain.

Nine and Twelve look at her and nod. They have no hesitation, because she is one of the few that hadn’t developed just mentally, but physically as well.

“We’re setting off a kitchen fire,” Nine whispers, catching up that she had heard his carefully modulated voice. “Twelve is going to leave something to make it explode. It’s going to be fast.”

Four nods. She could do fast. In fact, she is the fastest, quietest out of all of them. Experience on being a ninja, as well as the serum is acting here, enhancing her skills.

“Afternoon?” she says, just to clarify the point.

Nine doesn’t quite smirk, but it’s a close thing.

.

* * *

.

Four dreams of another life, where she actually _felt_ and could give back, knowing how to make friends in a slow and awkward way, but knowing that she needs friends.

She doesn’t want to wake up. If she wakes up, she would have to deal with a body suppressed of the hormone inducing empathy and emotions. She goes back and forth between these two extremes, feeling and non-feeling, that she wants to scream.

When Twelve’s hand shakes her awake, she is almost grateful. She doesn’t like to sleep, and running, even for her life, is familiar enough in both dreaming and in reality that things don’t blur.

“Where’s Five?” Twelve demands.

The albino is at the fringes of the group, a gasping, “H-here,” is managed.

Four wonders why they included her, given that Five is one of the batches whose bodies are on the verge of shut down. Physically, she is weak. It didn’t help that Twelve is the best – mentally.

Her ears itch and she says, “Someone is coming, is it soon?”

The boys look, for a moment, so overwhelmingly grateful for her ears. “Yes. Five seconds.”

.

* * *

.

When the fire starts, something in Shikako stirs.

In another life, she had been Shikabane-hime. Fires, explosions and corpses had been her legacy, the legend that surrounded that epithet.

Even the serum cannot suppress the deepest instincts of a ninja and fire is wired in her blood.

.

* * *

.

Later, Nine is giving high, keening sounds of someone trying desperately _not to cry_ – Twelve beside her looking bewildered and slightly panicked. Four wants to cry too, because out of twenty-six children, only fourteen had been left after five years of experimentation, three had escaped out of that.

They had killed eleven children in the explosion. It wasn’t supposed to be that big, Nine murmurs. The explosion was supposed to be contained in the kitchen, supposed to be a distraction.

“We’ll get better,” Twelve declares, a smile on his face that doesn’t reach his eyes. “We’ll study and know things and get better. So we won’t hurt anyone when we start fires.”

Four looks up at that, because this is the plan neither of the boys had told her. What they wanted to do now that they were out is a complete mystery to her.

“Explode?” she says. She is getting better conveying entire paragraphs in one word. Soon, she might be able to communicate without speaking. Or perhaps something to cover her ears. Their sensitivity to sound is more painful than useful, sometimes.

The boys exchange a look. “We want to show them,” Twelve explains.

“We were taken from orphanages,” Nine adds. “We were all forgotten, set aside. The spare children, the unwanted. That doesn’t bother me – us. We want them to remember that we existed.”

Remembrance. Lovely. It’s better than vengeance.

.

* * *

.

At the beginning of everything, once they’d seen the outside world again, their skills came in handy.

Four’s skills are stealth, speed and just being the kind of ninja Root had been. It is enhanced in practice as she steals a laptop and several phones for Nine to play with. For Twelve, she gets him a book on motorbikes, seeing his spatial acuity and how well he maneuvered his body.

Nine hacks into things, discovering how certain websites worked and managing to smile on good days. On bad days, he doesn’t sleep and dreams about fires and screaming children.

Twelve charms people and that’s how they slip under the radar of the librarian in the Public Library. They learn from books about Chemistry, Physics and a whole lot of other things. Four pickpockets people and Twelve buys them food and clothing. Nine then reveals _why_ he was in the top-tier of the Mental Testing. He outstrips both of them, building plans for remote controlled bombs, finding floor plans and archives.

Twelve and Four scrambles after him, not really hurrying, but understanding that Nine had a definite plan forming in his mind, especially when he starts printing things from the archives of the Police Department.

“It’s a good plan,” Four says once she gets the gist of it. “But we won’t get out of this alive.”

It’s one thing to plan in the far future and another thing to say the outcome like that, so blatantly, a matter-of-fact thing that was stripped of everything else but fact.

The boys pause and agree with her.

“I don’t think we will live long anyway,” Nine says, a sad note entering his voice. “I had headaches last night.”

Headaches, which all other children had before they died. Twelve turns white.

“When?” he demands and Four flinches. “How long?”

The determination in his face tells her why he’d been reading those chemistry books. He wanted to reverse the process, or at least, slow it down.

“For as long as it takes,” Four says flatly, when Nine looks like he didn’t want to answer. “All of us have deadlines now.”

Twenty-six children, only three left. Even then, they had very little life-expectancy.

The Athena Plan was a failure, and only they would know the end of it, if they failed this too.

.

* * *

.

Their plans of doing a crash-course on Chemistry is halted when the pain in Four’s ears reached excruciating. Nine hurriedly studies electronics and engineering, whispering, “They have hearing aids. We can reverse-engineer those and allow you to modulate your hearing.”

Twelve helps him, though the kind boy occasionally stops to give her a wet washcloth for her sweaty face.

Four dreams of being Shikako, and sometimes wishes she wouldn’t wake up. That life, while fraught with peril and filled with enemies, had been worth it. This life isn’t worth it. There isn’t anyone that she loves. She doesn’t even know if she can love.

But she might manage to love Twelve like a little brother. She is close to loving him. Nine, she thinks she could love too. He cared enough to halt their plans to help her deal with her pain.

It takes two weeks, while Twelve gets a crash-course on pickpocketing and Nine hacks into questionable websites, but it is worth it when they slide a rudimentary modulator on her ears and the world numbs itself. She can’t even hear her own heartbeat, and that’s wonderful.

“I can listen again,” she says, and her voice is no longer a whisper.

The boys give her delighted smiles – they smile with their eyes, not with their lips - and she pushes them to bed when she gets a good look at their faces.

.

* * *

.

The plan, in its rudimentary form, is simple. Less chance for there to be mistakes. They keep a basic structure of it in their minds and go about learning, understanding and finally, blending in. Until they could be mistaken for ordinary citizens if they went about it.

Hiding and escape, Four deals with. She memorizes the city layout, shares this with the boys because they need it more than she did.

Twelve learns to drive. He crashes several vehicles this way and figures out which part goes boom in a hurry.

After almost getting arrested, Nine learns to encrypt. He hides his methods and hides behind several other walls just to make fake identities.

All of them learn about bombs. Four has the knowledge of two lifetimes in her head and this puts her ahead of them, but not by much. Nine doesn’t allow that to rest and he outstrips her by the end of the week. Twelve is only marginally slower about it, if only because his type of learning is the physical sort. Four doesn’t doubt that while the theory of bomb-making is going to be digested faster by both of them, Twelve would be the first one to build one.

.

* * *

.

When things get hard though, and Nine has consecutive headaches and Twelve doesn’t hear things because of the loud buzzing in his ears, Four contemplates asking them if they could just guilt trip one of the people who had supported the Rising Peace Academy.

“We might be able to,” Nine says out loud. “Psychological attacks are always better anyway.”

They look to Twelve, who seems a bit bemused. “Who do you pick, out of all the bastards that did this?”

Now, that is a question.

“The Ministry of Health and Welfare,” Four says. “Does that satisfy you?”

Twelve is really the only one among the three of them that can smile. He smiles then and he gives a childish laugh. “We must send them pictures. Lots and lots. I think he’ll like that, those bastards.”

Nine’s smile is less of a smile and more of a baring of teeth. “We’ll show them the graves. How could anyone forget?”

And this side project, heaping guilt on the people that begat them, is Four’s. The bombs and the main plan belong to the boys, but this is hers.

.

* * *

.

The problem, Four muses, is that the Athena Plan was a government secret. Finding any pictures or files to blackmail or cause psychological distress is harder with almost no evidence.

Luckily, psychological distress doesn’t need images, though images do help.

It just needs words.

A plain paper, torn from a calendar. The words, “Twenty-six children are watching.” A UV bath to erase fingerprints. A plain envelope delivered precisely to the home address of the Prime Minister of Health and Welfare.

In the process, she hacks into many more places than she usually does, learning more about the Athena Plan and feeling that old helpless feeling of rage well up again.

With the absence of pictures, Four takes up sketching.

She’s particularly good at it, something about her body that takes up physical skills very well. She draws Eight. She doesn’t know why, but she draws Eight.

Four didn’t have many good memories of the Settlement but Eight had been one of them.

Eight was a girl, black hair and blue eyes with gentle hands.

When everyone else avoided those who had headaches, Eight hugged them and took care of them. When someone started vomiting blood, Eight mopped up the blood and just cuddled them. And when the tremors started, Eight held their hands until they died in their sleep.

Eight started to have headaches the night they set the fire.

Eight, who might have been alive, only to be burned alive by the fire they set.

When Four finished, she stared at the picture of Eight holding a pencil. Eight wasn’t smiling, because she had never smiled. She probably didn’t know how. The absence of the smile made the picture wrong somehow, which was also strange.

“You’re good,” Nine said, looking very pale at the image of Eight. Frozen in time and unchanging.

“I don’t know why I drew her, among all of them,” Four murmurs.

Twelve draws closer and almost flinches when he sees what has them so mesmerized. “Eight…was nice. It would have been better if she could have grown up and learned how to smile too.”

Twelve had hit the hammer on the head and Four hunches her shoulders.

 _I miss her_ , she doesn’t say. She didn’t have the right to, when Four didn’t try to save her.

.

* * *

.

Four psychologically tortures all of the people involved with the Athena Plan.

She starts slow, with letters, spaced evenly by every two weeks. If it’s scheduled, they’d learn to accept the fear, after all.

Then, after months of that, she sends them sketches.

Sketches of graveyards. Colored drawings of bloodied young bodies. Sometimes, if she’s feeling especially angry, she draws the children who died the most terribly, the ones who died vomiting blood.

And then, once they look harried and tense and wary, Four sends them pictures of their families.

Sketches, as though their children were part of the Athena Plan too.

She knows she succeeded when she drives one to suicide.

Four stops, a bitter taste in her mouth.

“One of them killed himself,” she spits out angrily, storming into the room she shared with the boys.

Twelve smiles, one of his attempts at learning to smile. It’s a gross facsimile of a smile, but he’s getting there. At the moment though, Four sits between them and pouts.

“Why are you angry?” Nine asks.

She sniffs. “He took the easy way out, I still had a couple more sketches to give him,” she mutters. “But aside from that, I have to stop. Because if the others do the same, then a string of suicides by highly influential people is going to be investigated and might be traced back to me.”

Twelve tackles her at one side. “Aww, you’re so considerate, not ruining our fun, Four.”

Nine pats her back and shows her _his_ attempt at a smile. It’s just as terrible as Twelve’s, but not quite, because Nine practiced in front of a mirror every night.

“How far along are we in our plans now?” she asks.

“We’ve finally found where we can get plutonium,” Nine says. “We’re trying to see if we can steal it.”

Four forgets her upset as she is rapidly absorbed in the planning. Both boys might have been geniuses, but infiltration and theft was still one of the skills she had over both of them.

**Author's Note:**

> Might continue it or I might not....we'll see....


End file.
